BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source solid modeling system that includes interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, image and signal-processing tools, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, libraries for robust geometric representation, with more than 20 years of active development.

Out of only 10 selected, we're very proud to announce that BRL-CAD is participating in the 2013 Google Code-In (GCI) program! Complementary to the highly successful Google Summer of Code program for university students, GCI is a contest through January 6th encouraging pre-university students (age 13-17) to get involved with open source.

BRL-CAD was selected to participate in the 2013 Google Summer of Code Doc Camp. A team of contributors got together in California, brainstormed, and wrote an entire book for BRL-CAD in just a few days. They created a guide for contributing to BRL-CAD.

After nearly an entire year's worth of intense collaborative effort, the 7.24.0 major release of BRL-CAD is now available for download! This is the alpha release unveiling of Archer/MGED, a preliminary interface update to BRL-CAD's graphical geometry editor. Some highlights include an integrated graphical tree view, a single window framework, drag and drop geometry editing, information panels, shortcut buttons, improved polygonal mesh and 2D sketch editing, level of detail wireframes, NURBS shaded display support, and much more.

Out of only 10 chosen, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD was accepted to participate in Google Code-In (GCI)! Complementary to the highly successful Google Summer of Code program for university students, GCI is a contest encouraging pre-university students (age 13-17) to get involved with open source. Students will work our "itty-bitty" tasks related to code, documentation/training, outreach/research, quality assurance, and user interface.

After more than six months development, BRL-CAD 7.22.0 is now available! This is a substantial introduction of a new development line encompassing more changes than any prior version since BRL-CAD's release as free open source software.

The forwarded announcement below describes an achievement for one of our optional dependencies, the Open Shading Language (OSL) from Sony Pictures Imageworks. OSL is basically an open source shader system that helps rendering tools make better pictures. Kudos to their developers -- it's quite an impressive achievement to have an entire film shaded with just OSL.

For BRL-CAD's fourth year participating in the Google Summer of Code, we expanded our involvement and accepted a record 11 students. Predominantly evaluated on the student's ability to develop, communicate, and interact, their proposals were selected from among more than 50 received as exceptional candidate developers for BRL-CAD. A categorized summary of this year's projects follows.

BRL-CAD is once again delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code! BRL-CAD was selected as a mentoring organization and will be helping students develop project proposals through the April 6th application deadline. Any students interested in joining the BRL-CAD development team this summer can jump straight to our project ideas page. We're certainly open to other ideas too. As a comparatively smaller development community, chances of having a good application accepted are (very) high with BRL-CAD so join our mailing list and introduce yourself today!

A little over a month ago at a week-long coffee-infused hack-a-thon in-person gathering, many of our core developers worked on improving BRL-CAD's source code. The team inspected and fixed more than fifteen hundred issues being reported by Coverity Static Analysis*. Just released, the 2011 Coverity Open Source Integrity Report includes a two-page case study detailing our efforts. The free report is available (registration req'd) through the Open Scan Initiative website.

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"There is no conclusion, except the obvious: nothing is so simple. The
beautiful is not always the popular, the popular is not always the
trivial, the trivial not always the unimportant, and the unimportant can
be sometimes beautiful." - Alain Fournier

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